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Robin Updike fiber arts
presented by Kawakubo and Yamamoto startled the
Western fashion world and, to a certain extent,
transformed it.
"Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion," an
informative and frequently beautiful exhibition recently
showed at the Seattle Art Museum, the exhibition then
moved to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,
Massachusetts, where it is on view to January 26, 2014.
"Future Beauty" is curated by Akiko Fukai, Director
and Chief Curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute, one
of Japan's most noteworthy fashion history and
costume foundations. With most of the clothing on
loan from the Kyoto Costume Institute's collection,
there are outfits by Japan's most celebrated
contemporary designers from Kenzo Takada and Issey
Miyake, the first Japanese designers to sell their clothing
in the West, to clothing made in the last few years by
Junya Watanabe and Rei Kawakubo. Internationally
famous for her Comme des Garçons label, after more
than forty years in fashion design, Kawakubo is still
highly influential.
The first gallery at the Seattle Art Museum
showcased pieces from the historic 1983 Spring/
Summer Paris shows by Kawakubo and Yamamoto as
well as clothing made as recently as 2009 by Watanabe
and others. The curators here quote from "In Praise of
Shadows," a famous 1933 essay by the Japanese writer
Junichiro Tanizaki, who described a Japanese
preference for nuance in aesthetics of all kinds, whether
in literature or design. He praised shadows because they
COMME DES GARÇONS by Rei Kawakubo, Spring/Summer 1997. Photograph by
Takashi Hatakeyama. All garments collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute.
21 ORNAMENT 37.1.2013
N
ow that asymmetrical silhouettes, unfinished
hems and monochromatic palettes are well
established in mainstream fashion, it is useful
to remember that only thirty years ago such aesthetics
were decidedly outré even in the world of high
fashion. As late as the 1980s trend-setting high fashion
came only from Paris or Milan and it took an expert
eye to discern much difference between French
and Italian design. Then the Japanese arrived and
everything changed.
In the autumn of 1982 Rei Kawakubo and Yohji
Yamamoto presented their 1983 Spring/Summer shows
in Paris and the fashion world reeled. Though the two
Japanese designers had been successful in Japan for a
decade, the minimalist, deconstructed, black and white
collections they sent down the runways in Paris in 1982
were groundbreaking. While French and Italian
designers were making clothes that made women look
like countesses, movie stars or well-heeled hippies,
Kawakubo and Yamamoto presented clothing that was
more liquid sculpture than costume.
The Japanese designers played with light and
shadow with elaborate draping and carefully torn
fabrics. Rather than accentuating the female form with
complicated darts and tucks, as in European and
American fashion, Kawakubo and Yamamoto made
clothing that was layered and cocooned so that the
wearer became a part of a moving sculpture. Though
their ideas were grounded in the nuances of traditional
Japanese design, the superficial austerity of the clothing